Well hello, friend. I’m feeling kind of bombed out today, but I just jump-started my Sunday with some McGuyver cooking advice for Sleepy. How did those short ribs turn out, Sleepy?

(I don’t know how to spell that guy’s name, and I’m really feeling too surly to look it up. I was thinking a more Scotsman spelling might be MacGyver, but I’ve never known any Scots, so I’m basing the “Scottish” spelling off of watching a subtitled “Highlander” on a plane to Taiwan. I’m basing “McGuyver” spelling off of Mc=some kind of hamburger, Guy=Burt Reynolds, and ver=a noise a really sick muscle car makes.)

So without looking anything up on your petty “internet”, which would you choose? A guy in a meadow with a sword and long hair or Burt Reynolds taking a huge bite out of a Big Mac while ramping a Thunderbird over the Grand Canyon?

You think I don’t mean what I say? Here’s the car I’m looking into buying. The 4-door black one, so more people can come to the dogtrack with me. Yeah. What’s up now, doubters?

Anyway, on to the main event. Michael Ian Black is really, really funny. He’s the guy from “The State”, a show I’ve never seen and cannot endorse lest I ruin my perfect run of suggesting Pure Gold. But his book “My Custom Van…” is re-read material. Something you need in your purse when you’re getting your car out of the impound lot. It’s something I want to read to people except that it would be like retelling a joke, and people don’t ask you out for coffee or whatever if you re-tell jokes. Unless you have some sort of medical condition which causes people to feel the need to do so. And nobody wants to think about that!

Yeah, so if you like the idea of becoming a Big Brother to an orphan kid and completely dominating them in a game of pick-up basketball and talking a lot of trash, then here’s your man:

Filed under: dj mixes, slowblogger

I wanted to write about the next five albums I’ve been listening to, but some of them suck, so what’s the point of writing about that, I’ll leave that to pitchfork. This post totally turned into a dancehall oddyssey.
Dancehall – The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture – Their comes a point in every young white dude’s life where he says to himself, “I think I like dancehall” It usually happens like this:
step 1 – You hear Bob Marley at the age of 11 on the easy listening station or after watching Captain Ron and think to yourself, “wow, that guy has a cool accent, and I can dance to the music with out thrashing about. Dreadlocks are rad.”
step 2 – You are in your late teens, probably at college, and you are old enough to say, “Bob Marley is so played out” but not old enough to realize you sound like a douchebag, you start listening to other reggea artists.
step 3 – Most people die out at step two, but their are some who take it to the next level. I am musically retarded. About 50% of the time it takes a while for things to sink in my head, alot of my friends have been listening to dancehall and reggae for years. I never hated it, but never went full-dancehall-throttle.
It recently piqued my interest from a dj perspective, it is the perfect music to play early on, the crowd doesn’t have to be too drunk to move to it and its a type of music that is gender friendly, meaning if you play fruity house too early the girls might dance but no dude will. If you play rap too early, you get aggro-dudeface coming up to you for the rest of the night wanting to hear Snoop, Dre, or Biggie when all you wanna play is the ass-shakin booty-beats.
Anyway, The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture is a companion cd to the book.
Written by Beth Lesser, which is on my watchlist over at turntablelab.

Lesser and her husband travelled to Jamaica throughout the Eighties, she interviewing musicians for her Reggae Quarterly fanzine, he snaffling up records for his weekly Toronto radio show.

The cd comes highly recommended, every song is a classic.
This lead me down another path as well, “what is the difference between dancehall and reggae?” When I typed this question into the goo goo, this link was the first to come up. That guy sounds like a dancehall hater, so I kept digging and eventually ended up at the all mighty wiki-wonderland.
Here is what comes up when you type reggae into youtube.
I can’t believe this is what comes up, it is the worst representation, it is a cheese factory the likes of which your baby-boomin aunt bessie would pick out as “Reggae”.
Sadly this is what comes up when you type in “dancehall”.
Don’t get me wrong the ladies are lovely, but after reading all the stuff I read I would hope something like this would be first:

What I learned is that dance hall is to reggae, what drum and bass is to rock (SATs!). In conclusion, reggae has transformed into that crunchy hippie girl you went to college with who whined about the environment while driving 5 blocks to a PIRG meeting, where as dancehall is the motherfucker who can out-drink, out-drug, and out party your ass and carry you home.

Filed under: slowblogger

Attention Slowtimers: I stole a copy of TopHat’s new track “Cobra Verde” and I leaked it online!
I worked on it with producer Doug Rotwitt, and this video is the behind-the-scenes documentary of us jacking the song. Tophat didn’t want it out “til it was finished”, but I am contributing to the current mutiny here at Slowtimer.com. Get it quick before he makes me take it down!
editors note: song will be available again soon!

Filed under: slowtimer reports

In an effort to become Slowtimer’s “Next Top Poster”, I am padding my authorship with some serious filler.

mmmmm hmmmm….
Vanishing Cream.

This is really what I did with my day so far. The psychology of the Slowtimers becomes clearer as the smoke rises and the world appears as it truly is: infinite. Or is it the tide that is rising and the mindset is actually becoming murkier?

It is worth mentioning the series of clicks that brought me to this station. Ok, I read the drunk history post, then I was like, “Hey that one guy looks familiar… Wasn’t he in Juno?”. Then I clicked on the “Letterman” video, and I was like, “Oh yeah… he was in Superbad. That’s cool he does crazy videos on YouTube. That reminds me of me and my brother.” Then I clicked on some interviews he did with Jason Bateman. Michael Cera. Hmmm. That just shows how Slowtimer is really just a pop culture learning center. I learned dude’s name. Now I can make clever pop culture references and shit whilst having polite converstations. I never used to take the time to learn this kind of stuff, but thanks to Slowtimer… now I can. Somehow between Jason Bateman and lunch I found this:

Filed under: slow-filler